


as real as you make it

by magnification



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Can Town, Dreams, Friendship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-04
Updated: 2013-08-04
Packaged: 2017-12-22 09:16:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/911511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magnification/pseuds/magnification
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The road to becoming best bros has to start somewhere.</p>
            </blockquote>





	as real as you make it

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vapours](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vapours/gifts).



Karkat is asleep in Can Town.

You find him there curled up under the bridge in the fetal position—which makes you wonder whether trolls even call that particular configuration of body parts “fetal,” since apparently they don’t gestate—with the Mayor standing on his toes, adding a plastic cup to the top of a nearby tower. You look at him, gesture down at Karkat with a flick of your neck. The Mayor looks at him, then back at you, then blinks. You like the Mayor. You like anyone who doesn’t have to talk to get a point across, but the Mayor is a pro at it without even realizing he is. The Mayor is the best guy on this asteroid.

Though looking at Karkat slumbering down there, you wonder who’s the runner up.

It’s weird, though, seeing Karkat not yelling, not all flushed and flummoxed. He’s peaceful as a damn baby, or a larva, or whatever the hell even it is that trolls are when they’re little. He’s still clutching an empty can of orange soda, as if he passed out mid-urbanization.

The Mayor scurries out and something about him leaving makes you feel as if you’ve been caught, which is totally ridiculous, since he’s not even there anymore to catch you, and you weren’t doing anything to begin with. Just scoping out an unconscious alien sprawled in the midst of an aluminum metropolis. NBD. Nevertheless you feel as if the walls are vibrating with silence, pressing it to your skull, and if anyone were around and awake enough to hear, you’d probably begin muttering to yourself to fend off the quiet. It’s accusatory. You can find enjoyment in many things, but not quiet.

So you nudge Karkat’s side with the tip of your sneaker. You want to regret doing it, since he looks so serene, and he never is, but you need some organic noise. Even if it’s his high hoarse grumble of, “Fuck. What.”

“In the Can Town, the mighty Can Town, the kaiju sleeps tonight,” you answer in singsong. “Look at you. Tuckering yourself out. Hard work, building a scale replica of a mid-sized urban environ, huh.”

“I’m exactly awake enough to know how badly you need to go fuck yourself,” Karkat replies. He rubs his head right in between his nubby horns and seems for a second as if he might sit up, but instead he rolls onto his back and runs his hand down his face like he’s trying to wipe his features off. “Don’t sing your weird human melodic poetics at me, Jegus. You have no idea how hard it is to sleep sometimes.”

You want to scan the towers and spires of Can Town for any apple juice, since this is what you came in here for, but then Karkat rolls back onto his side. He doesn’t look at you. He’s trying to avoid you, you think. You squint, and you wonder, then, what color he really is. How much lighter his skin is than your sunglasses will allow you to determine.

“Right,” you say. “The Cthulhu Pals hatin’ on you every time you close your eyes.”

“No,” he spits, and suddenly he is sitting upright and a three-can-high structure topples over in a quiet echo. He is pointing at you with his sun-colored claw all but flaring at you, a tiny flame at the tip of his finger. “‘Pals,’ fuck my entire ass. Just the whole entire thing. I don’t care what Terezi or Kanaya or who-goddamn-ever told you, they’re not like those fucking grubdiaper tentaclebeast larvae Rose is all about. You try dreaming about them sometime, garbagefuck.”

You have been biting the inside of your mouth and now you think you taste iron.

You know you’ve seen Karkat angry before. Karkat is always angry. Karkat goes out of his way to find things to be angry about. Karkat is so angry so consistently that you wondered for a while, in the beginning, whether he felt any other emotions at all. Of course then you remembered that you’re one to talk, so you shoved that thought right back down into your throat and you eased up, if ever so slightly, on deriding him for the things about which he got angry (if not the fact of his constant anger). But right now he is livid, and his whole body is trembling, and you pluck an empty can from the top of the pillar beside you, and you murmur, “Dude,” and you don’t know what to make yourself feel next.

Karkat groans. “Fuck. I mean. Shit didn’t even used to be this bad before the damn game. I mean I had nightmares all the time but who the fuck doesn’t every single night of their shitty lives. They weren’t this bad, though. Even if I could never get, you know, my Prospit back, if I could never wake up there again, I’d rather have those dumb shitty nightmares than the ones I’ve had ever since we started all this absolute fuckshit.”

The circles under his eyes look darker than ever. You want to say something to lighten the circles but instead, ahead of yourself, you say, “It’s just some shitty dreams, though. They’re not real. You go to sleep and your brain goes on adventures, not you, who gives a shit.”

“Um, me, obvidamnously,” he says, and you know that. “Dunno what kind of adventures your ass got up to but mine are pretty horrific, not that it’s a pissing contest.”

You shrug. “Derse ones.” You’re back to grunting and you don’t know how to get yourself to communicate in anything but. You rap your fingers against the sides of the can you hold.

And in time, Karkat is rapping his against his legs. “You were always awake, huh.”

You shrug again, but this time it means yes. You place the can back on top of the pillar, careful. “I’m the luckiest asshole in Can Town,” you say. “Shit Lucky Charms and fly around on a god damned rainbow. Where do you think I got all the boondollars I got. Shit.” You’re half chuckling to yourself now. Though you might be doing so because you can see the smirk creeping across Karkat’s lips. “Takes leprechaun heritage to run a LOHAC stock exchange ratchet like I did.”

“Least you realize it,” Karkat says. He brings his knees up, wraps his arms around them, tucks them under his chin. He is so small this way. You’ve known he was short but you’ve never noticed how small he is, small all over, like his skeleton or his exoskeleton or whichever he’s got is a scaled down replica. You feel too tall, so you sit down, facing him. You’re still a lot larger, but you don’t feel like you can hurt him anymore. Even through your shades he looks as if he is the hue of a rain-swollen cloud drifting in front of the sun on a hot day. Usually you miss those clouds, but right now you don’t.

“Where’d the Mayor go,” he asks.

You take the can from Karkat’s side, the one he had held in his sleep. “He’s the Mayor, dude, he’s got important business to attend to.” He chortles without mirth but not without agreement, so you take it as a good sign.

So you place the can in the empty space between the two of you. You don’t know what you’re doing with it. Not building anything, you know that much. But there’s a part of you that feels like it belongs there between you, neither clutched in his hand nor standing atop a five-foot skyscraper behind you. Karkat sticks his claw into the ring of the tab, then traces the outline of it with his fingertip. You might, perhaps, be right.

He yawns. You say, “Go back to sleep.”

“Get a drink,” he replies, lying back down. “That’s what you came here for, right?”

This means “stay.” He is so small and you think you know every inch of him and you know you don’t but it would all be familiar if you learned it.

“Could sing your ass a lullaby,” you answer.

“Don’t you—” he yawns again, then shuts his eyes. “—dare.”

“Like literally.” You’re smiling and he’s drifting off. “Right into your ass. Lie down and I’ll whisper the sweetest melodies of slumber into the cushiony protrusion of your ass. Give you the best forty winks you’ve ever gotten.”

He’s out before you’re done muttering. When you finish, you watch him breathe—up with full lungs, down with empty ones—for only a few moments before you take that can into your grip again and set it down by his hand, tucked under his cheek. You don’t know what to do after that.

So you sit, and your eyes close.

It would be so easy to get up and leave Karkat now. It would be so easy, if only it were easy at all.


End file.
